Marketing Lists – Columns From Related Entities

Hi there.

I’ve been playing around with the marketing lists and they seem to mostly work well for our needs. However, there seems to be one area that it’s lacking. I want to create lists that contain columns from my customers, but also from related entities.

For example, I want to target all customers who have had a failed order. I can create a list of customers in that state with the filters, however, I’d like to be able to reference the product name from that relation too. I only seem to be able to add columns from the entity itself and not from the relations. Is that right? Is there anything I can do to get related entity columns into a list?

I’m using the MailChimp bundle so the intention is to get these fields into MailChimp so we can create campaigns that reference a specific order or campaign.

Thanks,
Simon

Topic

[Artem LiubeznyiSpectator]

Hi Simon,

We disabled this functionality in the initial version of Marketing Lists in order to avoid ambiguity with many-to-one relations. Even in your example, the customer might have more than one failed order or more than one product name in said order—in which case the field should be populated with a collection instead of a single value.

I fully agree with you that it is still a valid case and I’d love to have it in the product too. We have this story in our backlog, but it’s currently hard to say when we will implement it. Please follow our updates.

Thank you.

[archy_boldParticipant]

Thanks for letting me know Artem.

I’m struggling to see how the feature would be useful for anything other than getting reports into the CRM in that case, it certainly doesn’t seem like we can launch campaigns from the CRM. Or is that the point of the marketing lists in Oro? Purely to get marketing statistics alongside customer information for reporting?

[Artem LiubeznyiSpectator]

Technically you can launch campaigns from OroCRM, just not big ones. But otherwise you’re right; the perceived use case for our marketing features is that you use OroCRM to segment out the exact set of customers you’d like to reach to (that’s Marketing List), then use an external tool (MailChimp or dotmailer) to prepare and deliver the campaign, and then collect the statistics back in OroCRM. Rinse, repeat—and the more marketing response statistics you’ll get the better segmentation you’ll have at step 1.

[archy_boldParticipant]

Cool, thanks for clearing it up. I’m sure we’ll have some use cases for this stuff.

[Author]

Replies